Intelligence, December 1993
"Business Focus at Internet World Meeting"

"...the most extraordinary and prescient presentation at IW was a talk given by Laura Fillmore entitled 'Internet Publishing: How We Must Think.' Fillmore...President of both Editorial Inc. and the Online BookStore, outlined nothing less than the future of publishing for the electronic age...

"Fillmore concluded her very special talk this way: 'As the publishing process itself approaches the speed of thought, we are presented with the delicious opportunity to focus more intently than ever before on the ideas themselves and their immediate dissemination to an interested audience.'"

Publishers Weekly, November 22, 1993
"Like a Book on a Wire"

"Such experimentation with Online publishing has only just begun among trade book publishers...

"...some technologists are now suggesting that the CD-ROM may only be an interim step to something bigger. They foresee a largely paperless and diskless future, when the much heralded information superhighway will be the chief pathway for books as well as video, phone traffic, music and computer data...

"But Fillmore says that timeliness and cost reductions are not the main reason publishers should be interested in the online medium. The principal advantages, she says, have to do with the things you cannot do in print, or even on CD-ROM...

"Many publishers simply want to know the bottom line: Is online publishing good or bad for the industry? Many publishers will rue the day when people stop going to bookstores and instead just browse the network from the confines of their homes. But others say that online publishing will expand the industry, without replacing paper publishing...

"But one thing is for sure: Book publishers need to be involved, if only to assure that the information super highway is not just a vast video-on-demand shopping mall. As all forms of other media are zooming along the superhighway, according to Fillmore, publishers are responsible for keeping alive the works upon which
the past five centuries of Western civilization have been built. 'Publishers, as major content holders, need to get on the bus,' she warns. 'The capability of not using words is right around the corner. If we as a culture don't preserve our words, then there goes our abstract thought.'"

"For the first time in the history of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) annual convention, the largest publishing show in the U.S., a live Internet link provided by UUNET Technologies right from the show floor hooked the publishing community to the world's largest network of networks."

"Fillmore believes that [the Online BookStore] will promote bound books by exposing their content to online users, who will then go into the bookstore to buy the title...

"'EI's intention is to spur book sales,' Fillmore said, adding that worldwide exposure via Internet has 'remarkable effects on the printed copy.' She said that Internet Companion publisher Addison-Wesley found that sales increased after its availability online. The book, first published in November, is in its fourth printing."

"The future has arrived for electronic delivery of books. Editorial Inc. of Rockport, Mass., and Software Tool & Die, in Brookline, Mass., have joined forces to set up the Online BookStore on Internet, the first service to deliver full text and graphic files of books from Internet to ordinary desktop PC users."

The Wall Street Journal, January 11, 1993
"Marketplace--Technology: Visiting a BookStore by switching on a PC"

"Coming soon to a PC nearby: a bookstore without shelves, selling books without paper. At the Online BookStore, PC users will be able to browse through books on their PC's...

"This isn't the first on-line service to make books available electronically...But Online says it will be the first to offer current titles in a way that compensates authors and publishers.

"'This has the potential to change the way we all do business,' says Keith Wollman, a senior editor at Addison-Wesley."